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On Fiscal Cliff, Not All Businesses Oppose Raising Taxes
Tweet Share on Facebook December 3, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
As negotiations over debt and taxes continue in Washington, business groups have broken ranks. They now show an unusually wide range of positions on this crucial issue. This week, 15 owners and founders of small businesses were invited to meet with the president to discuss taxes and debt reduction. The diverse group included owners of a footwear company, an independent music retailer, a mushroom farmer, and an online gift shop. These entrepreneurs challenged the conventional thinking usually put forth by the trade associations that lobby on tax issues.
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Unemployment Insurance Must Be Included in Fiscal Cliff Deal
Tweet Share on Facebook November 30, 2012 CommentChad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The Congressional Budget Office, known as the CBO, has released a timely new report on an important element of the "fiscal cliff" that policymakers should not overlook: Federal emergency unemployment insurance, which has been in effect since the summer of 2008 but is scheduled to expire at the end of this year.
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Stimulus Better Spent on Infrastructure, Not Tax Cuts
Tweet Share on Facebook November 30, 2012 CommentAndrew A. Samwick is a professor of Economics and director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College.
This month marks five years since the start of the Great Recession, which began in December 2007 as nonfarm payroll employment peaked. Although the National Bureau of Economic Research would not officially declare it for nearly a year, smart observers of the economy could see in real time that weakness in the housing and financial markets was spilling over into the economy as a whole. In his remarks at the Brookings Institution on Dec. 19, 2007, Lawrence Summers, who would go on to serve as chairman of the National Economic Council under President Obama, provided a very clear diagnosis of the looming challenges.
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Washington Indecision on Fiscal Cliff is Stalling Job Creation
Tweet Share on Facebook November 29, 2012 CommentRon Lazof is a Job Creators Alliance member and Managing Director at Prism Advisors, LLC, a management advisory and consulting organization focused on emerging growth businesses. He is the former President and CEO of Behr Processing.
All planning begins with a firm knowledge of where the journey starts and at least a general knowledge of the journey's end point or goal. Starting or expanding a business enterprise, the by-product of which is job creation, is such a journey.
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AT&T and Verizon May Not Lead Telecom Industry for Long
Tweet Share on Facebook November 29, 2012 CommentRobert Hahn is director of economics at the Smith School, University of Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Peter Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute and a consultant to the Legatum Institute's Prosperity Index Group. They are cofounders of Regulation2point0.org, a web portal on regulatory policy.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that the two U.S. telecom leaders, AT&T and Verizon, will remain the industry leaders for a long time. But conventional wisdom is often wrong in the information technology biz, where companies must run all-out just to stay in place.
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Development Program to Contain Climate Change Not as Good as It Looks
Tweet Share on Facebook November 28, 2012 CommentPeter Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute and a consultant to the Legatum Institute's Prosperity Index Group.
On first look, it seems one of those terrific ideas every market-friendly economist wishes he'd thought of first. Here's the deal: Most developing countries have neither the cash nor the inclination to contain climate-changing emissions on their own. Yet many of the cheapest opportunities to pare greenhouse gases—everything from capturing methane from waste to switching to more efficient boilers—lie in these countries. Why not let companies in Europe, Australia, and Japan, which are legally obligated to reduce emissions, anyway, pay for these projects (directly or, more likely, by purchasing credits earned by others) to offset obligations back home?
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Obama's Re-Election May Bring Flurry of Regulation
Tweet Share on Facebook November 26, 2012 CommentPatrick McLaughlin is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
President Obama's re-election would normally mean there is no need to be concerned about "midnight regulations,” the surge in regulatory activity that occurs during the lame duck period of an outgoing presidential administration. However, according to insiders and experts on regulation, we may yet witness a post-election spike in rule-making that is similar to what we have historically seen after the Oval Office changed hands. Welcome to Washington, where even broad daylight can be made to appear like midnight.
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Obama and Congress Must Protect Family Farmers
Tweet Share on Facebook November 21, 2012 CommentOn Thanksgiving, millions of Americans will look with pride on their dinner table, grateful for the feast they have been able to provide. Hopefully they will take a few moments to thank the American family farmer whose boundless and tireless efforts provided this great sustenance. America's farmers provide not only for millions of Americans but countless citizens across the world.
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Sequestration Defense Budget Cuts Not as Drastic as They Seem
Tweet Share on Facebook November 20, 2012 CommentVeronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
In a few months, the federal government is scheduled to implement a series of across-the-board spending cuts in a process known as sequestration. The two parties agreed to these cuts last year as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling by a cumulative $2 trillion.
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Online Courses Don't Threaten Traditional Higher Education
Tweet Share on Facebook November 19, 2012 CommentJoshua Kim is the director of learning and technology for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science program at Dartmouth College.
Clay Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation has captured the imagination of educational technology higher circles in which I travel. For example, at the recent EDUCAUSE conference, the largest gathering of academic technology professionals, the emergence of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, was largely framed as a disruptive innovation. But is that true?
